New Zealand Post - Goodbye email, hello Teams!

There is a simple reason New Zealand Post’s No.1 ranked team on Microsoft Teams was initially established – to replace email. 

Shane Sinclair, NZ Post’s Chapter Lead Data Engineer, was sick of the hundreds of emails he would receive in reply every time he sent out a group email. 

So when NZ Post hit its peak period in the lead-up to Christmas 2020, he decided to create a team on Teams where all operations issues could be discussed, for all to see, with no need to send a single email. 

Shane’s ERS (Enterprise Reporting Server) Operations team produces NZ Post’s arguably most important daily report. It tracks parcel delivery across NZ Post every day, a measure used to show NZ Post’s daily performance, called the Daily Courier Performance Dashboard. This team was identified by SWOOP Analytics as one of the world’s top performing teams on Microsoft Teams, based on high productivity measures, and the No.1 ranked team at NZ Post. 

The Daily Courier Performance Dashboard is a crucial report to NZ Post, and if it’s even minutes late each day, it delays up-the-chain meetings relying on the report. 

Shane admits the report can be a bit problematic which, before creating his team on Teams, meant he’d often have to send an email to communicate the problem. 

“The problem with that is I’d then get a million emails back asking what’s happening,” Shane said. 

Shane Sinclair, NZ Post Chapter Lead Data Engineer.

“I got irritated with that because it was more trouble than it was worth, dealing with all these emails. So I set up a Teams channel for the ERS stakeholders to communicate to them when there were issues with that report, or any other issues with ERS, so that would be the primary channel. 

“If someone is asking what is happening with ERS they could go there. If I wanted to tell the world what’s happening with ERS, I would put it there.” 

Shane then set up another team for those working on data and analytics, and producing the Daily Courier Performance Dashboard report, to include them in the notifications if there was a problem with the daily report. 

“I didn’t think email was very good and the way Teams works is a much better approach to getting out that information that I wanted out get out quickly and also succinctly without having to spend a lot of time typing an email,” he said. 

“It was a centralised way of communicating and I didn’t want to use the old news reporting email messages. 

“My sense was it would be a quicker way to tell people what’s happening and also a quicker way to respond to them because email gets buried in amongst all the other emails that people receive whereas by using a team within Teams, you’re much more likely to get a prompt response. 

“I’m certainly going to respond to an alert from a Teams message much more quickly than I will from an email. So that’s the reason I chose it and if people had questions, they’d get a much prompter, a much quicker, response through Teams then they’re going to get through email.” 

Another benefit, Shane says, is everyone in the team is able to follow the conversation; “Whereas with email, depending on who gets cced in, everyone gets a message they don’t really care about or miss out on parts of the conversation.” 

As an administrator of the ERS Operations team, Shane can control who is in the team, which has six members. The previous email group had around 200 people. 

Keeping the team small was a deliberate move because it includes only those who need to know, and they can then pass the information along the chain. It also means every single post in the team is responded to in some way, a sign work is getting done with high collaboration. 

It’s this high reciprocity that helped the ERS Operations team be identified as one of the top 0.4% of high performing teams in SWOOP Analytics’ 2021 Benchmarking of almost 100,000 teams on Microsoft Teams. 

Chat v Channels 

Even with a relatively small group of people to communicate with in the ERS Operations team, Shane made the conscious decision to create a team on Teams and utilise channels rather than use a group chat. 

“I chose a team because I wanted to create a list of people I wanted to reach out to, which was relatively small, and then put announcements if something has gone wrong, something is delayed, there’s an outage in the upcoming week,” he said. 

“I found the team was a better way to do that than a chat. People can get added into a chat and that falls out of my control.” 

Teams – more than a replacement for Skype 

Nathan Loveday, NZ Post Technical Lead.

Asked why NZ Post launched Microsoft Teams, Nathan Loveday, a Technical Lead at NZ Post, replied: “Teams was a replacement for Skype”.  

That started back in 2016, and Nathan said it wasn’t until they began using Teams they realised the extra functions available, which are now heavily utilised.   

In 2019, NZ Post really began to rely on Teams as a collaboration tool across the entire organisation. Shane’s team is a perfect example of the way work is now done on Teams. Nathan said NZ Post’s Retail Learning arm was a prominent early adopter of Teams and also boasted teams in the top 1% of SWOOP’s 2021 Teams Benchmarking. 

By the time the COVID-19 pandemic sent New Zealand into a four-week lockdown in March 2020, most of the 2,600 NZ Post employees using Teams were competent users. Although, Nathan admits, even in early March 2020, it was thought to only ever be theoretical that staff would work from home. 

Data shows a massive increase in Microsoft Teams meetings from March 2020, a rise that has never since dropped close to pre-COVID-19 levels.  

Teams meeting usage at NZ Post.

Nathan said apps on Teams are popular at NZ Post. The most common app added is Microsoft To-Do, the tasks manager, followed by Communities, which accesses Yammer as an app within Teams.  

A move towards permanent hybrid working 

There are no plans for NZ Posts’ corporate employees to return to the office full-time. The ability to be agile is seen to be a huge benefit and one to be fostered. A hybrid work model is seen as the optimum working environment, ensuring flexibility in a future situation where employees may be forced to work from home. 

“It’s a priority to keep people working in that way,” Nathan said. 

“I think it hit everyone hard that up until COVID we’d been working in the theoretical (that we could work from home).  

“We’ve realised that we can’t swallow that breaking-in period if it happens again. We have to be working in a way that is constantly agile; we do have that agility to walk out the door.”